They say I think too much

Part-1: Desensitisation & GOW

I hope most people would have heard about Gangs of Wasseypur if not watched it. I loved the movie & I would highly suggest going for it. I feel that I am slowly joining the Anurag Kashyap fan cult. He gives raw & fresh perspectives and remarkable storyline to the bollywood cinema. He is one of those people who have given the blasé bollywood romantic movies a sidestep. His movies are like statement similar to Chetan Bhagat’s foray into writing though much stronger & richer in quality. Too much on him, this post is not about him, you can read about him in media news & on internet.

[Image: via wikipedia]

This post is about something I observed in retrospective after learning about a psychology lesson on learning. There was an experiment done by one eminent psychological cognitivist researcher, Bandura, named as Bandura’s Doll experiment. It was about how children learned aggressive action by watching a model hit a doll. You can read about it here. Its impact can be seen in the explanation of increased crime in society due to violent media & movies, desensitization to crime, justification of violence & disinhibition to crime. Focus of this post is about the desensitization to crime.

In the Gangs of Wasseypur(GoW) show, I observed how the audience was jubilant & laughing at the abuses & violence projected in the movie. Every time the characters use any abuse/curse, the whole crowd would be on a laugh wave, whistles going off, comments flying out. ( I also enjoyed it & shared the moments alike). After the psychology class, I started correlating it. Have we been desensitized to the crime? Does it encourage such behaviour in an individual? Has it been acceptable in our society to act or take such steps? Has our society already accepts it or glorifies it? Contemplating over all the questions seem to stuck onto first objection that I am considering it a new phenomenon and it has always been there. Even in the movie the gangsters admire the heroes in films. But the earlier movies had a filmy touch in it unlike the raw representation of contemporary movies. And I am accepting that it has already crept into our society and is there to stay for a long time entrenched deep into the psych of our past, present & future generations as movies are eternal in nature.I don’t want to get mired in the reasons responsible for this phenomenon when movies were not there my area of focus is contemporary times.

The next step after desensitization to crime is justification of violence and finally disinhibition to crime. The growing acts of open assaults in day light in public by hoodlum and political class is the evidence of ‘justification of violence’. All the growing cases of assault, remember manglore,Bombay,delhi,gurgaon ,on both men & women is strengthening the support for this point. Disinhibition is the tendency of not able to inhibit that particular behaviour. Hence, it would be hard to censure the criminal activities with each generation to come and with each enforced criminal act. Slowly I think there will be news about disinhibition of criminal activities increasing in our country. May be it has already occurred & just brewing to get on the surface soon. Already our patriarchal society has created so many societal issues & problems; one more would or have already taken its roots. There is still hope & ways to curb this tendency & changes in the society, but it would depend on out political & popular will.